The story, A Very Short Story, by Ernest Hemingway is told in the third person and reads more like a witness testimony than a short story with a purpose. The story is told in seven short paragraphs and 633 words. However, while the piece may read like testimony and fails as a short story, it most likely provided Hemingway with some therapeutic catharsis after he received a rather unkind ‘Dear John’ letter from the woman he loved, Agnes von Kurowsky. It also provides an outline for the first and best part of Catherine Barkley and Frederic Henry’s love affair in A Farewell to Arms.
The Letter and the Story
The second half of A Very Short Story, echoes what Agnes von Kurowsky wrote in her Dear John letter to Ernest Hemingway. The quarrel that the narrator of A Very Short Story describes between Luz and her soldier on the train ride from Padua to Milan seems to be verified and echoed by a statement that Agnes makes to Hemingway in her letter when she writes “I tried hard to make you understand a bit of what I was thinking on that trip from Padua to Milan, but, you acted like a spoiled child, & I couldn't keep on hurting you.”
Like Agnes, Luz from the story stays in Italy while her wounded soldier returns to the States just like Hemingway. Like Agnes, Luz falls in love with another man and finds herself suddenly engaged. Agnes writes of it to Hemingway: “Then - & believe me when I say this is sudden for me, too - I expect to be married soon.”
Both Luz and Agnes write that they believe that their ‘soldier’ will have a great carreer and indicate that they believe in the abilities of the man that they reject. Luz writes in the story “She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best,” which seems an abbreviation of what Agnes writes in her letter to Hemingway. “I somehow feel that some day I'll have reason to be proud of you, but, dear boy, I can't wait for that day, & it was wrong to hurry a career…And I hope & pray that after you thought things out, you'll be able to forgive me & start a wonderful career & show what a man you really are.”
A Transition by Hemingway
Hemingway is quoted as saying about Agnes “I loved her once and then she gypped me. And I don't blame her. But I set out to cauterize out her memory and I burnt it out with a course of booze and other women and now it's gone.” In the short story the ending provides a solid picture of this activity when the narrator says “A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.”
The Story and The Novel
Luz and her soldier in A Very Short Story, begin their love affair very similarly to that of Catherine Barkley and Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms. When Henry and the soldier waited for surgery they both experience a night with their respective nurses where they gaze across the rooftops of the town below them.
Both Catherine and Luz are popular with the other nurses as they volunteer to stay on night duty over a length of time. Catherine and Luz both prepare their men for an operation and both men are concerned about saying something silly or inappropriate while under anesthetic.
Catherine and Henry feel as if they are married and the narrator of A Very Short Story states that Luz and her solider felt as if they are married too. However, at this point Hemingway takes the two plots in different directions. The plot in A Very Short Story follows the basic line of Hemingway’s relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky while Catherine and Henry’s story takes an alternate route, one that seems to play out what Hemingway both dreamed of and dreaded.
Both stories end in a permanent separation between the nurse and her soldier. One ends in tragedy, the other results in anger. Both leave the solider isolated and alone.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. Scribner Classics. 1997. ISBN-13: 978-0-684-83788-8 ISBN-10: 0-684-83788-9
Read more about Ernest Hemingway at Suite101.
 |
